Character and intelligence are the two vital attributes required of business professionals. The successful application of character and intelligence in the real world earns the most meaningful form of respect and authority. I believe the highest human authority is the earned authority achieved by a supreme command of logic and facts.

Attached below are my CPA Exam scores (from many years ago!) and graduate school transcripts. The passing score on the CPA Exam is 75. I passed the exam on the first try and my average raw score was 93. Over half of the people who take the CPA Exam fail it. My statistical estimate is that approximately one person in 168 did better than me on the exam, placing my own performance well into the 99th percentile. (See the explanatory footnote below).

I graduated from my MBA program summa cum laude (after working 7 days a week for 2 years!) and was invited to join the Phi Kappa Phi and Beta Gamma Sigma national honor societies.

Why should you care about this? Why does it matter?

Because Better Thinking Produces Better Results

Einstein said “imagination is more important than knowledge.” The very highest quality thinking considers what-if scenarios, risk and reward, cost and benefit, logic and facts and illuminates the shortest, quickest path to the world we want to live in by following a line that is straighter than straight. (See the note below on Geodesic Lines). It is just as much a mistake to become over-comfortable with the status quo as it is to blindly assume that any change, merely because it is change, must mean something better.

The best thinking usually involves great design and great planning which produce innovative solutions to problems in ways that far exceed expectations. We can say this about high quality thinking: You will know it when you see it, and it will cost you when you don’t. Competence counts; incompetence costs.

Intelligence is power. It is the power to achieve solutions that are radically correct and profoundly right. Insight and knowledge can transform disaster into a miracle. Better design can accomplish the impossible. Intelligence replaces blind, ad hoc reaction with systematic, comprehensive thinking. But intelligence cannot guarantee infallibility nor can it ever achieve in the sufficiently long run an error rate of zero. As the recent movie "Limitless" showed, there are limits to everything.

The bottom line is that when you hire me for your tax, accounting and consulting needs you put the power of 99th percentile thinking to work for you and your business.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But what if the space through which the line passes is curved? Airline pilots routinely handle the problem of navigating across the shortest path along the curved space of our spherical world. You can be sure one-dimensional thinking is never good enough. Two and even three dimensional thinking may be inadequate for solving many types of problems. See: